Mathematician suggests firing deep-ocean sound waves could stop tsunamis

By Luke Dormehl January 26, 2017

deep ocean sound wave tsunami 17580401 l — Kevin Carden/123RF

Tsunamis, also known as seismic sea waves, can be devastating. In 2004, a 100-foot wave in the Indian Ocean resulted in at least 230,000 deaths in one of the deadliest natural disasters in human history. In 2011, another tsunami led to Japan’s Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster when waves exceeded the height of the plant’s sea wall.

It is therefore a massive understatement to say that figuring out a way to stop tsunamis in their tracks would be a good thing.

Related Videos

With that in mind, a mathematician at the U.K.’s Cardiff University has just presented a new idea he thinks could help: halting tsunamis by using deep-ocean sound waves to rob them of their amplitude and height.

“The classical water wave theory ignores the effects of water compressibility on the grounds that acoustic (sound) and surface (gravity) waves are virtually decoupled,” Dr. Usama Kadri, from Cardiff University’s School of Mathematics, told Digital Trends. “This is justified for many applications as acoustic and surface water waves have very different temporal and spatial timescales that each can be treated as if the other did not exist.”

“[To the] contrary,” Kadri goes on, “acoustic-gravity wave theory concerns both compressibility and gravity effects and provides a general solution for these two types of waves. The most exciting part is that despite the differences, providing the right conditions, these waves will resonate with each other and exchange energy.”

Such acoustic-gravity waves could be repeatedly fired until a tsunami was dispersed.

It should be noted that, at present, this is still just a smart theory, rather than anything which has been tested in the real world. The next step would involve a proof-of-concept experiment, which could be carried out on a small scale at a research facility with a wave tank. For that to happen, Dr. Kadri said that he will need to “collaborate with experimentalists that have the proper facility and equipment.”

Only after that is done would serious thought need to be put into building a machine large enough to fire off suitably large acoustic-gravity waves.

“If it is proved theoretically, then the rest is an engineering challenge and a policy maker’s call,” Kadri continued. “There is a lot to be accomplished prior to any practical move. In particular, there is a need to study the environmental effects, along with a more realistic interaction scenarios.”

Editors' Recommendations

Topics

Emerging Tech

Did tsunamis reconfigure the Red Planet billions of years ago?

new evidence points to natural disasters that hit mars billions of years ago tsunamis header 970x970

About 3.4 billion years ago, while the earliest multicelled organisms were busy seeding the evolutionary pathways for life on Earth, Mars was getting rocked by meteor impacts that devastated the planet's northern landmasses with tsunamis so large they dwarf most of those seen on earth during recorded history. Presumed shorelines were wiped away by the waves, and the debris they carried became geological formations, indelibly marring the face of our red neighbor.

Evidence of two such events was discovered by Alexis Rodriguez, a researcher at the Planetary Science Institute in Tucson, Arizona, along with a team of colleagues who found traces of the catastrophe using satellite imagery. The tsunamis seemingly occurred within a region of the Martian landscape where two major regions -- the Arabia Terra highlands and the Chryse Planitia lowlands -- bump up against one another. This area has inspired heated debate among researchers over whether ancient Mars featured a northern ocean, as many points where the highlands and lowlands meet seem to resemble a shoreline. If the findings of Rodriguez's team hold up upon further review, it could finally lead to an answer. The main source of contention focuses on the remains of that potential shoreline, which is not visible in all places it should be, and therefore has caused uncertainty among scientists.

Emerging Tech

Scientists have developed a way to predict severe heat waves months before they happen

heat wave prediction

Unexpected heat waves may be a thing of the past thanks to new prediction technology that can provide a warning for a heat wave up to two months in advance, reports the New York Times. This improved prediction technology doesn't look at weather patterns, air temperature or similar weather metrics. Instead, it relies on an unusual data source -- North Pacific ocean temperature.

In a study published this week in Nature Geoscience journal, researchers from National Center for Atmospheric Research explain how ocean surface temperatures may correlate with a heat wave. Researchers began by examining climate data from the Eastern United States between the years of 1982 and 2015. They then identified sweltering summer days, defined as being 12 degrees hotter than average summer temperatures, and compared this data with ocean surface temperatures in the North Pacific during these same warm periods.

Mobile

The next big thing in science is already in your pocket

A researcher looks at a protein diagram on his monitor

Supercomputers are an essential part of modern science. By crunching numbers and performing calculations that would take eons for us humans to complete by ourselves, they help us do things that would otherwise be impossible, like predicting hurricane flight paths, simulating nuclear disasters, or modeling how experimental drugs might effect human cells. But that computing power comes at a price -- literally. Supercomputer-dependent research is notoriously expensive. It's not uncommon for research institutions to pay upward of $1,000 for a single hour of supercomputer use, and sometimes more, depending on the hardware that's required.

But lately, rather than relying on big, expensive supercomputers, more and more scientists are turning to a different method for their number-crunching needs: distributed supercomputing. You've probably heard of this before. Instead of relying on a single, centralized computer to perform a given task, this crowdsourced style of computing draws computational power from a distributed network of volunteers, typically by running special software on home PCs or smartphones. Individually, these volunteer computers aren't particularly powerful, but if you string enough of them together, their collective power can easily eclipse that of any centralized supercomputer -- and often for a fraction of the cost.